An amazing new video shows the full extent of the Mars Curiosity rover’s landing on the Red Planet.

The video is composed of thousands of still photographs taken at 1600×1200 and then composed together into full HD 1080p.

“The result was applied a heavy noise reduction, colour balance, and sharpening for best visibility,” said the YouTube uploader dlfitch.

[np-related]

The video comes in stark contrast to past videos of the landing which used low resolution thumbnails and did not convey the sense of motion and space.

For best results when watching the video, watch in full screen mode in as high resolution as possible.

The images were all shot from the Curiosity’s MARDI (Mars Descent Imager) camera on the way down. If you really want to reconstruct the video yourself, you can grab all of the raw images here.

__

LASER BLAST

REUTERS/ NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout

On Sunday, the rover used it’s powerful laser to zap a Martian rock for the first time.

The high-powered laser gun designed to analyze Martian mineral content, and scientists declared their target practice a success.

The robotic science lab aimed its laser beam at the fist-sized stone nearby and shot the rock with 30 pulses over a 10-second period, NASA said in a statement issued from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.

Each pulse delivers more than 1 million watts of energy for about five one-billionths of a second, vaporizing a pinhead-sized bit of the rock to create a tiny spark, which is analyzed by a small telescope mounted on the instrument.

REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/LANL/Handout

The ionized glow, which can be observed and recorded from up to 7 metres away, is then split into its component wavelengths by three spectrometers that give scientists information about the chemical makeup of the target rock.

The combined system, called the Chemistry-and-Camera instrument, or ChemCam, is capable of discerning more than 6,000 different wavelengths in the ultraviolet, infrared and visible light spectrum and is designed to take about 14,000 measurements throughout Curiosity’s Mars mission.

The purpose of Sunday’s initial use of the laser, conducted at roughly 3 a.m. Pacific time (1100 GMT), was as “target practice” for the instrument. But scientists will examine the data they receive to determine composition of the rock, which they dubbed “Coronation,” NASA said.

“We got a great spectrum of Coronation – lots of signal,” said ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the instrument was developed. “After eight years of building the instrument, it’s payoff time.”

BROKEN WIND

Researchers discovered the damaged wind sensor while checking out instruments that Curiosity will use to check the Martian weather and soil.

The cause of the damage wasn’t known, but one possibility is that pebbles thrown up by Curiosity’s descent fell onto the sensor’s delicate, exposed circuit boards and broke some wires, said Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for Curiosity.

A second sensor is operating and should do the job, but Vasavada said scientists may “have to work a little harder” to determine wind speed and direction, which are important factors that can determine when the rover is allowed to move.